Massive and Multiplayer The idea of persistence is no bigger than in the realm of massively multiplayer online games. RPGs have dominated the MMO arena for a few years now, and action and strategy games have been slow to catch up. The good news is that, in general, the guys I talked with think someone will eventually crack this tough nut (surely some of them are already trying). "This is another fertile area of innovation that could dramatically change the way we think of the genre," comments EA's Louis Castle. "The ability to offer tools that allow people to interact in exciting new worlds within the game space is very promising and I'm sure someone will figure out how to do that in a massively multi-player way."

But for the time being massively multiplayer games offer some challenges that haven't really been tackled in typical multiplayer arenas or in single player games. While developers have been experimenting successfully with persistence in single player campaigns (and a couple of multiplayer ones) adding hundreds or thousands of players into an overarching campaign is a daunting task.

Supreme Commander

The MMORTS has been attempted in the past. Sovereign, Sony Online Entertainment's first attempt, ended up failing. It's an expensive process to create an MMO at any level, and the San Diego based company decided that the cost was not matching up with the quality of the game, and cancelled it before it was ever released. Shattered Galaxy, a much smaller title by Nexon, tried and succeeded in some respects but still fell short of what most gamers would expect out of a MMORTS.

Rob Pardo identifies one of the main challenges when he says, "the whole basic idea in a strategy game is that someone wins and someone loses." It's the problem that I had with the MMOFPS PlanetSide -- that any victory small victory was meaningless in the larger picture. Without the incentive of making a lasting impact on a world, it's hard to care.

"Start from Battlefield, not World of Warcraft" says Chris Taylor. "Twenty guys on a side maybe with games starting every few hours or so. How can I come home, fire up the game, and have an impact after the game's been happening for months? If the war is being lost, why would I want to lose for that long anyway? By day six I know we're going to lose, why would I want to play the seventh? Games have to be short enough that they can start over." That, naturally, presents a problem in itself. What if a player simply keeps missing the beginning or end of a game and what happens to the persistence that is the hallmark of these massively multiplayer persistent games?

"A different kind of mechanic needs to be introduced to support armies that can persist over several battles," suggests Joe Bostic. "You need that element of RPG where you build an army and you need something where it's not just about the battle where you're at. I think it's possible it's just very complicated." Perhaps not only smaller PvP battles but also some PvE battles? Co-op attacks against computer enemy strongholds? Trophies for victories?

Adel Chaveleh postulates that "RTS multiplayer battles are similar to instanced MMO areas, so we might see something closer to a 'Guild Wars RTS' before we see a truly MMORTS. Somebody will eventually make a popular 'true' MMORTS, but, it probably won't play exactly like a classic RTS, simply because the classic RTS formula doesn't work well in the MMO environment."

Myth II: Soulblighter

The Rise of the RTT From big to small, one of the other challenges for the genre is classification and all of the subgenres that are slowly growing into genres in their own right. One of the most prevalent is the real-time tactical game (RTT). This is the battle within the war where players care more about individual units and what happens to each of them. While many of these tactical situations are currently held within larger strategy games, they've been breaking out into their own for a long while.

But first, what's the difference between strategy and tactics? It's the broad and the narrow. The large and. the small. The long term and the short term. Strategy requires planning for the future and large-scale decisions. Tactics focuses on the smaller group and the maneuvering in the heat of an immediate battle. For example, a strategic option in StarCraft might be whether or not to expand to a new resource early or spend time building up defenses at an existing base where a tactical decision would be whether to fry a group of zerglings with a psionic storm or just rush in with zealots to save that psychic power up just in case hydralisks are coming in right behind.

Myth is one of those games and still one of the most exciting that I remember playing. Going into a situation with a set number of troops requires some serious consideration of how to micromanage troops rather than consider how to use resources like wood or place buildings around the environment. It's suddenly a crushing blow when one of your archers is taken out and there's no hope of reinforcements.

There have been plenty of other tactical RTS games released onto the market since then, many of them set during World War II. Blitzkrieg, Codename: Panzers, Soldiers: Heroes of WW2, and the upcoming Company of Heroes area all great examples. Games like Ground Control and even Full Spectrum Warrior also gave it a try in different settings.